Joan Fontaine was a delicately feminine adornment in movies for nearly 30 years and a fine actress. She gave at least half-a-dozen outstanding performances, usually played Englishwomen, though she never lived in Britain, and most of her films set in this country weren't made here. She was born in Tokyo a year after her equally beautiful actress sister, Olivia de Havilland, their father a British patent lawyer, their mother a retired actress. When the marriage broke down, their mother took them to California and remarried there. The brunette Olivia was the first to enter films and when the blonde Joan followed her, their mother insisted she take her stepfather's name, Fontaine.

Unlike Olivia's, her career began slowly, but 1939 was a great year for both: Olivia appeared in Gone With the Wind and opposite Errol Flynn in two movies; Joan played the sole female role in George Stevens's great imperial adventure yarn, Gunga Din, and Cukor's The Women.

Although she played bitchy femmes fatales in Ivy (1947) and Born to be Bad (1950), her most distinctive work was as good women experiencing troubled relationships with older men – as the second Mrs de Winter in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), the heiress who marries the duplicitous Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941), the woman carrying a torch for Charles Boyer in The Constant Nymph (1943) and the eponymous heroine of Jane Eyre (1944).

She was Oscar-nominated for the first three, receiving the statuette for Suspicion. Her greatest variation on this role, and the best film she appeared in, is Max Ophüls's Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), a film she co-produced and starred in as a discarded mistress in fin de siècle Vienna.

Her subsequent work was generally less interesting, mainly society ladies and aristocratic figures. She was a Bavarian princess in Wilder's The Emperor Waltz (1948); a medieval heroine in Ivanhoe (1952); a misled wife in Ida Lupino's The Bigamist (1953); and a misled fiancee in Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). Her film career ended in a fairly decent Hammer horror flick, The Witches (1966).

Fontaine married and divorced four times: her first husband was actor Brian Aherne, and two others were producers. A lifelong feud with her sister, begun in childhood, is part of Hollywood legend and became quite bitter in 1941 when both were Oscar-nominated and Joan won. That Olivia went on to win twice made little difference, and in 1987, when they attended the Academy Awards' 60th anniversary, they were furious to discover they'd been booked into adjacent hotel rooms and demanded to be moved. The frostiness has continued and they've now become two of the few surviving stars of Hollywood's Golden Era.

Fontaine and The Women "I learnt more about acting from one sentence of George Cukor's than from all my years of acting lessons. His advice was simply this: 'Think and feel and the rest will take care of itself.'"

Sir Geoffrey de Havilland (1882-1965) The pioneer aviator and designer of the Mosquito, the most versatile fighter bomber of the Second World War, was Fontaine's cousin.